Bollywood actress and rising International star Priyanka Chopra on December 26 delivered the prestigious Penguin Annual Lecture in Delhi.

She became the first woman to climb the podium which has previous been headlined by figures such as the Dalai Lama, Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha and Dan Brown.

Priyanka’s topic for the lecture was ‘Breaking the glass ceiling – chasing a dream’, a phrase PeeCee admitted she isn’t very fond of.

“Why do you want to fit into a glass slipper when you can shatter the glass ceiling? I want to tell you a little secret. I’m not very fond of this phrase ‘breaking the glass ceiling’. It takes the context of everything that I have done, all my achievements, all my hard-work and puts it into a box, as if my ambition was to just find a glass ceiling and break it. Not at all. To be very honest, I was never on a mission to break or shatter anything. All I wanted was to chase my dreams,” PeeCee said in the beginning of her lecture.

She progressed, “But that does not mean that the glass ceiling doesn’t exist. Of course it exists, and countless of women and men, mostly women, run into it in their professional and personal lives. The Oxford dictionary definition of ‘the glass ceiling’ is ‘an unacknowledged barrier to advancement in a profession, especially affecting women and members of minorities from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy.”

Urging her fans to never settle for less, Priyanka said, “I want you to aim higher, because you know you can. And honestly, it’s all I did. Every step of the way all I did was set a higher standard. How did I get here? By being fierce, by being fearless and by being flawed.”

The 35-year-old actress also encouraged her fans to always embrace changing in life and explore new avenues. “Who am I really? Most often we don’t allow ourselves the ability to dream beyond our imagination. We don’t allow ourselves to think of the future because we are afraid of change, we are afraid to move away from what is familiar. Shake it up. Change is the only constant in life.”

Recalling how she went from being an aspiring engineer to the person she is now, PeeCee said, “I wanted to become an aeronautical engineer. What am I today? I’m an actor, I’ma singer, I’m an author, I’m a producer, I’m an artist. How do go from becoming an engineer to all of these things? I made choices. That is my rule number two: let your dreams fly.”